If AI can perceive, can it be sentient?
I'd call any system that receives input to be "perceiving", and that can constitute a basic definition of "awareness" or even "consciousness", distinct from "self-awareness" or consciousness in the human sense, which we tend to think of in terms of sentience.

What the Chinese Room seems to argue is that sentience is based on qualia, which may be difficult or impossible to validate in another entity.  (With humans, we can assume another individual is sentient because we perceive ourselves to be sentient, and share the same medium of human brains and bodies.)

It seems increasingly likely that "algorithms sufficiently advanced" will one day be able to model human cognition, but the real question will be is it actual cognition in the sense of understanding, or mere imitation? ("Semantics" vs. "Syntactics")

Cognition is derived from the Latin cognosco, itself related to the Greek words such as γνωστός (a root of "gnostic")

The question and definition of sentience is less clear cut, but the argument re: algorithms relates to cognition thus:

"The lights may be on, but is anybody home?"